Marine officials have done an about face on their planned cancellation of the Cherry Point Air Show.

The Marine Corps air station announced earlier this month that budget constraints had forced base officials to ground plans for the popular open house.

Now, they are doing a 180, saying the air show will go forward for three days May 16-18.

“Right now we’re told it’s on,” said Mike Barton, deputy director of public affairs at the air station.

“It’s going to be next week before we can get any detail on where we are with the air show, at the earliest,” Barton said. “We have not released anything because it is still too premature to be giving out information.”

Barton said the decision was made last week.

“An air show is an event that takes months to organize and of course we will be doing organization of this right up until it happens,” Barton said.

Base officials have previously said that it takes more than 500 base personnel to put on the show, which features both civilian and military aerobatic acts in addition to a flight line full of static displays.

“You have to negotiate with different performers and work with their schedules and our schedules, so there’s a lot of moving parts involved,” Barton said. “It will take time to give you any conclusive information about who will be performing. I think that we will, in the middle of January, have more information that we can provide in terms of which direction we are going with this, when people are back from the holidays and we begin working on it.”

The last air show hosted by the base in 2012 drew an estimated 165,000. The Navy Blue Angels jet demonstration team was the featured performer at the last show. According to the Blue Angels schedule, the weekend of May 17-18 is still to be announced, leaving the possibility that the team could fit a show in at Cherry Point between the squadron’s Vero Beach, Fla. And U.S. Naval Academy appearances, which are a week before and three days after the Cherry Point show.

“This is great news for everyone here who goes to the show and for all of the businesses in town who expect all those people to come,” said Havelock Mayor Will Lewis. “It’s a great thing for our area just because of all of the people that will be coming to the area just to go to the air show. We live in an area where we’re familiar with the military but a lot of other areas are not. This is the kind of thing that I like the base to do because it gets people who are not familiar with the military to be close to it and be psyched just to be that close to the airplanes.”